![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/turtleman.jpg\")
\n Photo by Daisy Lin<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Last week I took my class to Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Their
\n assignment was to choose one object or exhibit in the museum and write
\n a detailed physical description of it. I told them to try to describe
\n the object for a reader who would never see it, to paint a picture with
\n words so that it could be imagined with clarity and accuracy.<\/p>\n
Of course, nowadays all of my students have clever little digital cameras The object above is one of my favorites in the whole museum. It Aztec artisans. There are many levels of symbolism layered in this intriguing However, personally, I think the guy who created this little gem was So he brewed up some lotus-mushroom space soup and imagined he had a Photo by Daisy Lin Last week I took my class to Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Their assignment was to choose one object or exhibit in the museum and write a detailed physical description of it. I told them to try to … Continue reading
\n which produce excellent photos like the one above, and know how to insert
\n them into their word processing documents. I have noticed a corresponding
\n decline in the the detail of the descriptions. I suppose I should
\n ban digital images from essays, except that<\/a> I
\n am a big fan of them myself and a believer in the old adage about a
\n pic v. K words.<\/p>\n
\n is called "Stone-turtle Man" and was created in Tenochtitlan, near what
\n is now
\n Mexico City, by<\/p>\n
\n sculpture. The Aztecs believed that marine turtles and other aquatic
\n creatures were symbols of fertility and the afterlife. The fact
\n that the image represents and anthropomorphic combination of man and
\n beast, it may represent a nahualli, a transforming animal spirit linking
\n a person to a deity. In addition, many native Americans cosmologies
\n believe that the entire world is splayed on the broad arching back of
\n a giant turtle.<\/p>\n
\n just a regular joe like me, who sometimes just wanted to crawl back
\n into some kind of a secure shell and let the world take a hike. He
\n probably owed money to his bookie (gambling was big among the Aztecs) for betting on the wrong team in tlachtli<\/em>,
\n the Aztec wall-ball game, sort of a cross between squash
\n and basketball, he hadn’t been home in days and his wife was looking
\n for him all over the jungle,his girlfriend
\n was
\n in
\n the middle
\n of a
\n six-day
\n sweat with
\n the village
\n shaman, his cretinous brother-in-law wanted to borrow his hammer and
\n chisel, he was overdue for his two weeks of gratuitous labor in the
\n King’s salt mines, and he was convinced that he was on the permanent
\n shit list of Macuilxochitl, the Aztec god of Sport and Gambling,
\n a.k.a. the God of Five Flowers.<\/p>\n
\n magical carapace to crawl into where he could dream away, invulnerable
\n and inviolate, unreachable and secure. I can relate, Stone-Turtle-Man.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"